Ray Harryhausen and Nick Park

Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen and Nick Park were interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 22 November 2003.

To mark the publication of his book, 'An Animated Life' (written with Tony Dalton), the bfi was delighted to welcome Ray Harryhausen back to the NFT to discuss his award-winning career and craft with fellow Oscar-winning animator Nick Park, Co-Director of Aardman Animations. Some five decades after it was first started, we also presented the UK premiere of The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare, a labour of love that Ray was able to return to with help from up-and-coming animators Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh.

Interview © BFI 2003

A big gorilla started it all

Tony Dalton: My name's Tony Dalton - you won't know me, I'm the co-writer of the book An Animated Life, which we're here this evening to celebrate - not just that but Ray, his life and career. I'm not going to be asking that many questions - at least I hope I won't be, but to do that tonight we have the creator of Creature Comforts, Wallace and Gromit, and Chicken Run, and he's taking time out tonight from his latest feature, which is Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Wererabbit - and that's hard to say, I can tell you. I'm very pleased to welcome Nick Park. [applause]

The first time I saw Ray was on this very stage and it was over 30 years ago, I have to say, when I was a young teenager. After that I had the pleasure of meeting Ray and we became very firm friends and that's why I helped him to write the book. Ray's influence is enormous on today's film-makers. Steven Spielberg said of him 'everything Ray did influenced me and I salute him every day.' James Cameron said 'the creations in my movies are really Ray's illegitimate grandchildren' and Nick himself has said 'he will always be the king of stop-motion animation.' Even Kermit the Frog was heard once to have said 'Ray is one of the world's great manipulators.' [laughter] To most of us he just makes fantastic movies. Ladies and gentlemen, Ray Harryhausen.[applause]

Having said I'm not going to say anything, I'm going to ask the first question: how did it all begin, Ray?

Ray Harryhausen: Oh my, well a big gorilla started it all, called King Kong. I saw it at the age of 13 and I haven't been the same since. So that shows how influential a film is. For some reason it hooked me, I don't know whether it was my dramatic background or what, but the fantasy element - I just felt I must see it again and again every time it was re-released or replayed.

TD: And you used to go with Ray Bradbury.

RH: Yes. I had a cohort of Ray Bradbury, who also loved King Kong, and Forry Ackerman, and we used to go all over the outskirts of Los Angeles to the ten-cent flea pits, years later when they reissued the film.

TD: And you were seen once, making worship in front of the wall, I believe.

RH: Yes. The wall of King Kong, until Gone with the Wind burned it down, was in the old Pathé lot down in Culver City and I used to have my dad take me out there on Sundays and some friends. We'd stand at the gate and see this wall and say 'Tabe, Bala kum nono hi, Bala! Bala!'. Then finally my wife and I, years later, went to the islands mentioned in Kong and when we arrived, there was no wall, no drums beating. We arrived in the early morning and there was no fog. I heard Max Steiner's music going through my head. Finally we met a native and I thought I'll try this language that Ruth Rose devised, and so I said 'Tabe, Bala kum nono hi, Bala! Bala!' and he put his hand on his hip and said 'what are you talking about?' in perfect English.

TD: That was Ruth Rose...

RH: So Ruth Rose must have rewritten the dialogue...

TD: But you taught yourself, Ray, didn't you? There were no books to...

RH: Yes, there were no books available at that time, about stop-motion. And I didn't really know about it. Half the charm of Kong was I didn't know how it was done. I knew it wasn't a man in a suit, and the dinosaurs couldn't possibly be a man in a suit, but finally, maybe six months later, I discovered the glories of stop-motion, and I got hooked, and then the rest you...

TD: But how did you find out about it?

RH: Well finally a friend of my father's who worked at RKO mentioned that they did it with little models, with stop-motion. Then Look magazine had a wonderful coverage of two pages with Fay Wray who was big, and King Kong, who was only 18 inches high and she was shaking hands with him. It destroyed my illusion. [laughter]

TD: And Nick, how did you start? Was it a similar story?

NP: I seemed to have followed exactly the same path as Ray, really, although obviously Ray has put down the foundations - I came a lot later, to a world that was already introduced to the techniques and already pioneered. But the same thing - I have, hearing Ray talk about his experiences of seeing King Kong, I have very strong memories of being a 12-year-old. I was reading Ray's book throughout this week and, already hearing from Ray in earlier meetings, of how you went to see King Kong as a young boy, and those are very vivid memories for me, because, like you, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and I think I wanted to be a palaeontologist when I grew up, and... it's funny, although many years later, I remember I couldn't wait to get home to see this film that I'd seen trailed on the TV - the magic of seeing dinosaurs living on screen for the first time.

RH: It's always a pity, I think, when present generations see this King Kong on a small box to begin with, because it's not the same picture when you see it on the big screen and you have to look up to it. It's a different picture, believe me. And when you first see it on a box, it doesn't stand out as much to a lot of people.

TD: Especially with King Kong - it's that kind of movie.

RH: Particularly with King Kong, or a Cecil B. DeMille film... even some of ours.

TD: I want to talk about you working in your... animators seem to work in back rooms, small, dark back rooms, at least as far as Ray is concerned. And Ray started off in his father's garage, and progressed on to a hobbyhouse, which your father helped you to build as well, but how did you start? How did you get the camera? How did you start building the models? Did you take advice on the models?

RH: Well it started all as a hobby. Of course, after I knew about stop-motion I borrowed a friend of mine's old 16mm Victor camera. It didn't have a stop-motion shaft on it - I had to tap it and hope I would get one frame. I'd made a cave bear and I thought I'd like to see what happens when I move it. And I shot it outside, in the sunlight, and of course all the shadows moved across the screen like time-lapse photography. So that was my first initiation to actually doing it and then I... of course half the charm was that you wanted to see if you'd created what you had in your mind when you got the rushes back.

TD: Yes, that was the great thrill.

RH: [laughs]... It was... that kept me going really.

TD: Nick, you had the same experience, presumably.

NP: Yes, same again, you know, years later, messing around in the garage, in my parents' attic, with my mum's home movie camera, discovering that my mum's home movie camera took a single frame.

RH: You had a one-frame shaft.

NP: Yes.

RH: Oh, I didn't.

NP: Yes, I know...

TD: That was 8mm, presumably, or 16.

NP: Standard 8mm, at first, but that was probably modern, wasn't it?

RH: Yes, they didn't have 8mm when I started out, it was 16, but I couldn't afford a good lab and a lot of my early material came back with half of it wiped off, in the lab, you know they did a dreadful job of developing it, so I think David Massaro still has some of it, but half of the picture is gone.

TD: That must be the nightmare for an animator.

RH: Oh it could have defeated me, but I went on and then I started losing my hair by pulling it out [laughter] - I would spend days animating something and then it comes back, and half of it's wiped off.

Patience and spontaneity

TD: Do you ever get frustrated with what you're doing?

RH: Me?

TD: Mmm...

RH: No. I try not to. It does, to the average person, I think, it is a tedious job. I remember James Cameron said that he tried animation in the early days and he found it very tedious. I've never found it tedious, have you?

NP: No, no, I think it's one of those things that you just take it as part of the... that's the nature of the beast, you know...

RH: It's not everybody's cup of tea.

NP: No, no, I mean what you've done seems to be a lot slower than the way we work at Aardman - we have a bunch of 20 animators working away.

RH: How many?

NP: 20.

RH: 20, oh my. [laughter]

NP: Right now there are 20 animators... you know, I'm directing, with my co-director, but I remember reading about - on the skeleton fight - doing 16 frames a day.

RH: I know. The accountants got very upset. [laughter]

TD: For those who don't know, 16 frames a day is actually not one minute, is it?

RH: It's not even one foot.

TD: Not one foot, I mean, yes.

RH: There are 24 frames that run through the projector, but I think it's about a foot of film.

TD: That's quite extraordinary.

RH: But there were seven skeletons fighting three men and I had to time it so that when the actor put his sword in a certain place there was a skeleton there to meet it. And so that all required frame by frame analysis and split timing so that the sound effects could put in the clashes and all that sort of thing.

TD: I want to go back to this frustration thing, because I know there's a story about you, when you actually got very frustrated and you threw a hammer once.

RH: That's right. That taught me patience in more ways than one. I had painted a foreground glass for a scene with a dinosaur. I took maybe two weeks doing it and then one day something didn't go right and I threw the hammer on the floor and it bounced up and broke the glass. So I thought 'I can't lose my temper any more.' But I did learn patience, I think, when I worked with George Pal Puppetoons. That taught me patience although I wasn't happy with the fact that they were pre-animated, they were mostly substitutes, but at least it taught me patience, so I'm most grateful for that.

TD: Can you explain 'pre-animated' - why the puppetoons were pre-animated?

RH: Well George Pal's Puppetoons, some of you may have seen them reissued, I don't know, but they were heavily stylised creatures... people, almost cubistic, and the heads were all turned on a lathe and he had 50 heads for each character: 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u' so he could synchronise the dialogue. It required a lot of patience even then, but I prefer Willis O'Brien's technique where you have one single model, because then most of the creation is on the set, don't you find that? If you have a single model, even though you may lay out the extremes, little things happen that one pose leads to the next.

TD: I think you named one of your models, so you could actually get into the model.

RH... Identify it. We had four gorillas in Mighty Joe Young, each one was slightly different. Marcel [Delgado] didn't make them quite exactly alike, but I named the one I liked Jennifer [laughter].

TD: So Mighty Joe Young's really called Jennifer... and why did you name it Jennifer?

RH: Because they were shooting - what was that film, Lust in the Dust?...

TD: Duel in the Sun.

RH: Oh, Duel in the Sun. They were shooting that at the same time and we had to wait to see our rushes, and watching the rushes of Duel in the Sun from the projection booth, I saw little Jennifer Jones crawling over the rocks after she was shot and a little quivering hand coming up... and I thought 'Well it almost looks like it was animated' so I named my particular gorilla Jennifer. I hope she never finds out.

TD: Nick, you've got 20 animators working at the moment, on one film. Do you prefer working on your own?

NP: I think I'm basically like Ray. I just love to get my hands on, you know, I love to create things from scratch and come up with ideas, like Ray, and see the whole thing through, like with the original Creature Comforts, I was animator on the whole thing... It's always a... if you lose something, if you give it away... we have such a great team now... we've just started shooting on a new Wallace and Gromit movie. It's a full-length feature film and every week we have Wallace and Gromit classes where everybody has to do exercises with Wallace and Gromit, just to get into character [laughter]. I don't know if you've ever done this, Ray, but I was wondering this, watching some of your footage recently, of... whether you actually do acting through yourself.

RH: Oh you have to, and I'm so grateful... I thought I wanted to tread the boards at one time in my early youth and I took a course at Los Angeles City College of Acting - six months. I think Alexis Smith was just ahead of me, but I never met her. And she got all these wonderful contracts - MGM and... I kept getting butterflies so I thought I'd be better off behind the camera. Opening night was always a worry.

TD: But you were on stage once, weren't you?

RH: Oh yes, I was in my high school drama.

NP: I was watching a clip from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, that I think we're going to see later, where the skeleton comes to life and just the way that... I just wondered if you'd acted it through yourself, because it's the way it moves its weight from one foot to the other - you just have to watch this when you see it - it's very human, it's very good, observant acting.

RH: I used to use a stopwatch. When I was animating Mighty Joe I would have a canvas on the floor and go through all the movements and time it with the stopwatch, but after I had a lot of experience with it I abandoned the stopwatch. But you do feel you have to put yourself into it, imagine yourself in the figure and what it would do, because all these little nuances that you see are created on the set, rather than pre-planned.

NP: So it's got that spontaneity to it.

RH: Yes, there's a spontaneity to it. It just hooked me and I love to do it. And I didn't want to get hooked again when I helped finish The Tortoise and the Hare because the boys, Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh, every time I went to America, they said 'come on and do a scene,' so I did a couple of scenes... I didn't want to get hooked again.

Dynamation

NP: You don't ever use video to help...

RH: No, you mean frame-grabbers...

NP: What I mean is act it through on video so you can observe your movements.

RH: Well we did for the dance - when we did the Shiva dance in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad I had a lady, an Indian dancer who's very famous, she went through it with her student and we strapped them together behind, so we had four arms, and she helped work out this dance with four arms, and I made mine with six arms, so I had to use my imagination with the other two arms [laughter].

TD: Going back to dinosaurs, which is going to lead us into our first clip, you have also put characterisation into those as well, haven't you?

RH: One tries, it's very hard to put a character into a four-legged dinosaur. A two-legged, like the tyrannosaurus we had, for example in The Valley of Gwangi, you could get a little more character than something on four legs, because they're more animalistic, but I designed the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth - it was very stout and a different concept - which you'll see in the book - than when I started out, and then I decided to make it more in a humanoid-torso type of lizard, so that you could get little human touches in it that people could identify in the audience.

TD: Shall we have the first clip, it's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the one that started all the monsters-on-the-rampage movies, and it's 1953.

[Film clip: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms]

TD: That's the one where you first used Dynamation. Can you tell us about Dynamation?

RH: We did, but we didn't call it Dynamation at the time.

TD: Can you describe the process to us?

RH: Well Dynamation, when we made Mighty Joe Young, a lot of the critics or reviewers said there was animation in the film and, of course, many people associate animation with the cartoon, so we tried to devise a new name when we made The 7th Voyage of Sinbad to avoid this confusion, that it was not a flat-bed cartoon. It carried on pretty well for some years until the publicity department felt the next picture should have a new name, so they called it Superdynamation. And finally it went to Dynarama, which has nothing to do with animation!

TD: Apparently Charles came up with the idea, Charles Schneer.

RH: Yes he did, the producer. He came up with the idea, he was driving a Buick at the time and he saw on the dashboard 'Dynaflow' and he thought 'well maybe we should use "dyna-" with "animation"' so we called it Dynamation, which, really, I think is a good description for it.

NP: How do you feel, Ray, about... I mean I love the creature animation in that particular sequence. It's so observant. Did you refer to animal behaviour at all in that?

RH: I kept in mind lizards a lot, yes. And then something my dog may have done...[laughter] When I did the octopus picture [It Came from Beneath the Sea] I went to the museum of sea creatures and observed the octopus. I remember when I took my drawings in to show [producer] Sam Katzman in the early days, he said 'oh that doesn't look like an octopus,' and he had in mind the kind that Popeye has, you know, where it looks like a fire plug with tentacles streaming out and he thinks the bag should be upright and I had an awful time talking about it. [laughs]

TD: Ray Bradbury was involved in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms as well.

RH: Yes he was.

TD: Can you tell us how that all came about? In fact, that scene wasn't going to be in it, I think, at first?

RH: No, that wasn't going to be in it. The script was quite a way in development with Eugène Lourié and Bernie [Bernard W.] Burton, the editor. We had quite a developed script and then one day the producer, Jack Dietz came in and put this Saturday Evening Post in front of us, with this beautiful little illustration of some beast attacking a light house. So we incorporated that in, and he finally got Ray Bradbury, he wanted him to write the next version of the script but that didn't mature for some reason, and so he bought the rights to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and they changed the name - it was originally called Monster from beneath the Sea - it's all in the book! [laughter]

TD: You've always had a passion... I just want to come onto the fact, I think it's often a myth sometimes that special effects people come on at the end of a movie. In the case of Ray, Ray is there from before the movie is even conceived, nine times out of ten, at least of the movies that you've made. And I just wanted to state that fact, because I think a lot of people have this image of...

RH: ...That I'm handed a script that somebody else has written... I work with a writer, right from the beginning. Many times I bring in the basic idea. I brought in The 7th Voyage, 20 Million Miles to Earth and the two Sinbad pictures and many others. I also work very closely with the writer in the development because he doesn't know what I can do. And our pictures were made on a very tight budget, and I had to compromise on scenes that I would rather do in a much more lavish way. When I conceived The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, I wanted to make it like The Thief of Bagdad that Alexander Korda made, as lavish. But nobody was interested at the time, so in order to go the other way I tried to make animation look like you could do it for a very reasonable fee.

TD: And during this time you were making the series of fairy tales.

RH: That's right, yes.

TD: Which are very close to Nick's heart as well.

RH: Yes.

NP: I have memories of one Christmas Eve, cosily watching the TV, 10 years old, and Hansel and Gretel - I didn't know that was Ray's film at the time, I'd have thought it was just some eastern European film that BBC2 had bought, I think it was about the time BBC2 came on air, in about the late 60s or something. And I just loved it completely for its quality and at the time I was starting to dabble in animation and it just made me want to... I didn't really know how it was done, but I just loved the feeling of it, and it just remained with me.

RH: How wonderful...

NP: There were many other influences, but I didn't know that was Ray's work at all.

RH: The snowball rolls on - I was influenced by Willis O'Brien, you were influenced by our films, and who knows what the next step will be. CGI has already come, but what's the next step? Holograms? Or what?

TD: We'll talk about CGI before we go, I promise.

Locations and budgets

TD: You always wanted to go abroad, didn't you? That's why you actually started writing a number of scripts. We're coming up to the film that I like of your black-and-white period, shall I say, 20 Million Miles to Earth. And you wanted to travel, so you wrote a script.

RH: When 20 Million Miles to Earth came along I originally had it designed for Chicago, and that the rocket would crash in Lake Michigan and I thought 'well, no, I'll have it crash off the coast of Italy, I've always wanted to see Rome.' [laughter] So I changed the whole script around, a 20-page outline that I submitted, and had it crash just off the coast of Sicily. And so finally, when the picture... after Charles and I had made a number of successful pictures together, he sent me abroad to find the locations, so it all worked out beautifully.

TD: Because often you didn't go on location recces, did you? Quite often...

RH: Most often...

TD: Oh you did...

RH: All the time. I picked out the location, because most of the work involved my work.

TD: I thought on The Beast that somebody else did that for you.

RH: Well, no, I told Eugène - he went on location on The Beast - they couldn't afford to send me. So even though I did the thing so cheap just to get my foot in the door, the budget wouldn't allow, so Eugène went, but I made a series of sketches of the shots I wanted and Eugène was very co-operative and got the plates that I had designed.

TD: Most of them were actually still plates, is that right?

RH: They were plates, yes, with crowds running, and occasionally a head would be cut off but...

TD: You'd correct that on the second run.

RH: We'd correct that on the second run.

TD: Which I learned while I was writing the book.

NP: In what way would you have to cut back on the budget? I mean to save money. Was it on the animation itself, or on the live action shooting?

RH: It was on everything. I mean, they didn't want to spend... I submitted budgets and then they'd say 'oh that's too much, we can't afford it' and then the next producer came along and said 'oh we can't afford what you did on The Beast' so the budget keeps going down. I got hooked on these low-budget pictures, and I just wish I had had more of a business sense. But maybe they wouldn't have been made if I hadn't made them so reasonably...

NP: Am I right in thinking you made most of the creatures at home?

RH: Oh yes, at home.

NP: It wasn't like a big studio set-up.

RH: No, I never had any... I did everything myself, and every picture I've made - 16 features - I've done every inch of animation myself, except for Clash of the Titans - I had to have help because we had technical problems, which we had to catch up on. But most of them are the first take. We seldom had the time or budget to make a retake, and so we, in some way, would cut a close-up in where there was an accident or...

TD: But this is careful planning, isn't it?

RH: This is careful planning, yes, and Charles and I were able to survive all the different periods, the kitchen-sink dramas that were popular, by making these pictures so reasonable, Columbia couldn't help but make a profit [laughter].

NP: Can I ask you, Ray, about that last clip, about the... there's one close-up of the monster...

RH: Yes, that was a hand puppet.

NP: How do you feel about that being...?

RH: Well I preferred not to use it, but I thought anything to cut down my time in animation, because I gave such a low... I was very conscious of that time.

NP: And the lighthouse itself crumbling was actually stop-frame...

RH: Yes, frame by frame, when the lighthouse fell over, each piece of brick that you see had to be put on a wire and animated down. We didn't have the budget for high-speed photography, so every inch - the same with Flying Saucers - when the buildings disintegrate, each piece of material had to be on a wire and animated at the same time the creature was animated.

NP: That's in a way more difficult to achieve than... you know, animating crumbling buildings and hard-edged objects...

RH: I preferred not to do it, but we had no choice at the time.

Skeletons in the closet

TD: We're going to have the second clip now, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which is 1958, and here we have the very famous skeleton fight which in England, in Britain, was censored from the original film, because they thought it was too frightening, and only reinstated many years later actually. Can we see the second clip.

[Film clip: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad]

TD: It seems you're always asking your skeletons to kill people.

RH: [laughs] Well what else? I mean they're already dead, how do you kill death? That was a big problem - how do you kill something that's already dead? So I always have to have them go up on high places to fall off... [laughter]

TD: I think the music in that sequence - Bernard Herrmann wrote the music...

RH: 'Castanet Concerto' I call it...

TD: Can you tell us how that came about?

RH: Well it was just his imagination, we didn't know what he was going to do when he saw the film, and he saw it of course in bits and pieces, and he had the reputation of being very outspoken, and if he didn't like something he'd say 'why did you show me this crap?' you know, and so we were holding our breath because sometimes a skeleton wasn't there and sometimes the actors were looking at a pole instead of a cyclops but he saw all the drawings and he finally consented to do it, and we were tickled pink to have him. I think that's one of his best scores that he did for us.

TD: How many did he do in the end?

RH: He did four films for us, Bernard Herrmann. His type of music fit our pictures beautifully, I think, and we were rather sad to lose him, but there were other problems that caused friction, shall we say.

TD: Perhaps money was one of them, I don't know.

RH: You could put it that way. [laughter]

TD: Before Nick comes on, I just wanted to ask about the shadow-boxing because it's going to be a very important aspect of this and several other clips that we've got tonight. Can you explain the process of shadow-boxing - how Kerwin [Mathews, who plays Sinbad] knew exactly where to be?

RH: Yes, we got a wonderful swordsman, Enzo Musumeci Greco - it's all in the book - he came on board the film and he helped me stage it. I made little sketches of how the skeleton always had to be in front of the actor, except in certain positions, and he worked out, so that... I didn't know much about swordsmanship... so he helped me work out how to make Kerwin look professional and the skeleton look professional. So we worked together on that, in short cuts, and it was laid out like a ballet. He clapped his hands at certain beats and Kerwin knew at that point the hand had to stop there, and it was a little hard for actors with a heavy sword to stop the sword at the certain point. But after about 10 rehearsals he knew pretty much the positions - to stop here and stop there, but then that presented me with a problem of getting the skeleton there to stop the sword, and so that all had to be split timing, and that required a great deal of time to get the proper effect.

NP: And that's all because the background plate of the live action has to be shot first.

RH: Oh yes, the background is always shot first. And then I shrink the actors to the size of the skeleton. In fact I think at this point it might be interesting...

TD: At this point we've got the skeleton.

RH: Who would be in here? [showing the audience a small black coffin] [laughter]... This is one of the skeletons - I think he was also in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad - my father made the armatures based on my drawings in America, when I was still on location, but it has every joint that a real skeleton... he's still in pretty good condition, considering he's about 35-40 years old, I think, isn't he?

NP: Was he one of the ones from...

RH: Yes, I also used him in Jason and the Argonauts, but each frame of film you have to move everything and keep in synchronization, so it looks normal on the screen. But he can open his jaw and get different expressions, and I even went to the extreme of studying swordsmanship with [Ralph] Faulkner on Hollywood Boulevard - he had a place where he taught actors. He taught Errol Flynn how to use a sword, and all the other actors. But then after I took the stance as... I wanted to feel how it was to wield a sword professionally. I threw my hip out of joint and I had to give it up. [laughter] But this is the size, so I shoot the background plates first and then reduce it to the size of the skeleton... I'm a people shrinker.

NP: There's a very nifty little bit in there, I notice, where some bottles on the table are wiped off the table with a sword. And that's obviously live action. And then the skeleton jumps in. I thought it was a particularly good way of tying the...

RH: I tried to tie it in so that it looked like he was part of the scene, because we had, in that picture, the problem that we didn't have a variety of film that was very sharp, and sometimes the difference between the skeleton and the projected image wouldn't be quite as sharp as the skeleton, so I had to throw the skeleton a little out of focus, to keep the projected image from looking too different. It was done mainly by miniature rear projection.

NP: So you can see the rear... you can see each frame of the live action.

RH: Yes. Shrunken down to the size of the skeleton and then each frame of film, I turn over the next frame, and then I match the skeleton's movement to match what is on the projection screen, which may be a foot or two feet away from the skeleton.

NP: So if the actors weren't exactly co-ordinated, you could improve that with your... just by adjusting the animation to make it work.

RH: A little, yes, up to a point, but if it's too extreme, we have problems.

TD: How many takes do you have, is it just the one take?

RH: Just one take, yes. Everything you saw there was one take.

TD: So if you don't get it, and you have to go on to the next shoot or something, or the next location, what do you do?

RH: The thought of redoing it always worried me, so I tried to do the best I could on the first take.

TD: It comes down to preparation... Can I ask what the skeleton is actually made of? I know the armature is inside.

RH: He has an armature, a metal armature inside, which my dad made on his lathe, and they're little tiny ball-and-socket joints, and to have a skeleton, you know, when they have flesh on them, you can hide the armature very easily, but to do a skeleton on top of another skeleton is very difficult, and so I had to take liquid latex and dip cotton into liquid latex, and then I built up the bone structure right on the metal skeleton.

TD: So obviously you have to study anatomy as well.

RH: Oh yes, very much so. You have to study everything. I envy the computer, all you do is sit down and put a tail on the donkey, or a head on the donkey, it's unbelievable.

Shadow-boxing

TD: Torin Thatcher, let's just talk about the actors, because they're very interesting, especially in this movie. Torin Thatcher, a British actor, was wonderful.

RH: Oh yes, he kept the whole picture together, because he knew enough... he's a very experienced actor and he knew enough to play just that much over the top, to make this a fairly tale, and that's what fantasy is all about, it's a fairy tale, and I think you need over-the-top acting. Some actors, you know, that come from the method concept, they're afraid to overact. But Torin gave that magician, I think, throughout the picture, if you saw the whole film, just the right amount of over-the-top to give it that fairy tale quality.

TD: And Tom as well, Tom Baker.

RH: Tom Baker did a wonderful job with his very expressive eyes, and we had the evil magician, I think, becomes almost... somebody wrote an article, I forget in what magazine, some years ago, saying that Koura [Baker's character], in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was the hero and Sinbad was the villain. And it sounded logical and I thought 'how come we didn't think of it?' [laughter]

TD: There's another movie there somewhere...

RH: But we like heroes as heroes, and not anti-heroes.

TD: We're next going to come to a film - one of my personal favourites - Mysterious Island. You're now living here by this time, you've moved here lock, stock and barrel. So has Charles, your producer. And you're offered Jules Verne's story, the sequel to 20000 Leagues under the Sea.

RH: Yes, Columbia had the story, that they were going to do years before, and then they cancelled.

TD: There's a very interesting story, you ate... the character that we're going to see, the creature that we're going to see... you actually ate him. Now have you ever done that, Nick, have you ever eaten any of yours?

NP: All mine are made of Plasticine... [laughter]

RH: Hitchcock often does.

TD: This is true... Let's have a look at the next clip: Mysterious Island.

[Film clip: Mysterious Island]

RH: You see how important music is. Bernie Herrmann did a wonderful score for that sequence. I bought the original crab at Harrods [laughter], rather mundane, isn't it? The fish market there had live crabs and I bought this edible crab and we took it to the museum so they could...

TD: The Natural History Museum...

RH: The Natural History Museum, so that a lady could deprive it of its life, humanely, and she took the shells apart and cleaned it and then gave me all the parts and I built special ball-and-socket armatures, such as you see in the skeleton. I built this armature inside and then put the crab... and so it's a real crab... it's not... we didn't want to boil it because it would turn bright red, so we had to have it destroyed before... and then when we went to Spain to shoot the actual sequence, we brought six edible crabs, big ones, so that we could photograph all the intricacies of the model, the little hairs moving, which it would be difficult with an animation, so that evening we had rather a nice meal [laughter]... and... the actors didn't object... Hitchcock would have been pleased.

TD: I bet they did object.

NP: What were the actors acting against in a sequence like that?

RH: They were shadow-boxing. Yes, I made a lot of sketches, storyboards, of where they should look, at what height, and they had to do it all by mime. But they did many rehearsals, of course, until I was satisfied that I could put the crab in where it is.

NP: And the little guy in the claw - he was animated?

RH: Oh, he was animated. When the claw picked him up, the little man in the claw was animated.

TD: My favourite little character that you had to build, that is picked up by a creature, is Raquel Welch, in One Million Years B.C., where she's picked up by the pterodactyl. You got a lovely little...

RH: Yes, she's in Berlin.

TD: ...Very exacting model of Raquel Welch. [laughter]

RH: Only small, she's seen better days, she's about 30 years old. But she's shrunk a little...

NP: What was she made of?

RH: Armature. She's about three inches high and she's completely jointed, and I had to make her look like Raquel Welch, with all her assets [laughter] and she's still in the Berlin museum.

TD: I'll say no more. How did you match in the miniature, where the crab is standing... ground, to what was going on in the...

RH: Well, you had to match it by eye, mostly. By that time I'd done a lot of matching. Sometimes we sent tests in to be sure the match was the same as on the projection, because when you're projecting an image, sometimes your eye, particularly in colour is deceptive of figuring out the foreground colour and the colour that's on the background plate. So you have to send tests into Technicolor overnight, which makes the budget much longer and time-consuming, but most of the time I tried to do it by eye. I got used to making compromises, and you have to match it so that it's not obvious that it's a projection plate.

Rabbits out of a hat

TD: Have you ever had to work with live action plates, Nick?

NP: No, well probably on commercials. As a studio we work with live action a lot, but I haven't done any commercials for a long time myself, but at the back of the studio...

RH: But you do when you put the sound effects in, don't you? The actors' voices over your puppets.

NP: Oh yes, with things like, well Wallace and Gromit yes, Creature Comforts yes. We record a track...

RH: You record that first.

NP: Like you, recording live action, we have to record the actual voice track first, so that we can do lip-synch. Have you done lip-synch - oh yes on the early puppet Mother Goose things...

RH: I never tried. I made the fairy tales... the first Mother Goose stories which you'll see - I think they're going to project it with one of the features. I made them simple because I didn't want to have 50 heads for each puppet, so I made about 10 heads with varied expressions and then dissolved in the camera - an eight-frame dissolve from one head to the other, which made it look like a rubber face. And finally I experimented on - when I was going to make Baron Munchausen - which you'll see in the book by the way. I experimented with a rubber face with little levers and in stop-motion I thought I could synchronise with a rubber face, but I never got around putting sound with it.

NP: We have a technique at Aardman that we've developed, which is - it just makes work a lot quicker - where we pre-make all the mouth shapes, 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u' and all the other consonants, and we can replace the mouths each time and smooth it over. But even with that we have to watch that it doesn't look too mechanical.

RH: Don't you see the fingerprints when you smooth it over?

NP: Yes, but we actually have grown to love fingerprints. [laughter] We don't hide them, we like them actually.

RH: That would worry me, to try to get rid of the fingerprints.

TD: The great thing about King Kong is that fact that the fur moves with the animator's hands.

RH: Yes, that was criticised by a lot of people, but you can rationalise it by saying that it was air blowing through his fur. [laughter]

NP: It's all part of the technique, really.

RH: That was part of the technique and people weren't as critical in 1933 as they are today [laughter]... in every magazine you see how it was done, and I used to keep it quiet because I found that half the charm of seeing Kong was that I didn't know it was done. And now it comes out in magazines how everything is done, before the picture's out. I think it spoils it. It's like if you have a magician telling you how he's going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you're no longer interested if he tells you how he's going to do the trick.

TD: Talking about pulling... oh no, go on...

NP: Sorry, Tony. I remember about a year ago I was in a taxi with Ray in Bristol and - he came down to the Bristol Animation Festival and I asked you a question about a shot in King Kong, whether it was live action, and you nearly jumped on me and strangled me. I asked if - there was a certain shot that has been controversial for years, a shot of King Kong climbing up the Empire State Building...

RH: You thought it was Charles Gemora in a gorilla suit. No it wasn't. [laughs]

NP: It's one of those things that's been discussed in magazines for years.

TD: It's like the missing scene, isn't it? The spiders - isn't somebody trying to restore the missing spider scene from King Kong?

RH: Ray Bradbury claims he saw it in Arizona, at a premiere, but it was cut out after the first premiere - they felt it held up the picture.

TD: But you've never seen it?

RH: I've never seen it, but just stills of it. But we had a sequence in the skeleton fight in Jason where, when Jason cuts off the head of the skeleton and it falls on the floor. And I shot a scene of it on its hands and knees looking for its head, [laughter] but it slowed down the pace of the sequence so we cut it out.

TD: We're still trying to find that sequence...

RH: I wish I had kept it, it's probably made into mandolin picks now!

NP: In the book there are many sections of storyboard, of various films. Would you spend long storyboarding, and changing much?

RH: No, the storyboards were maybe 400 little sketches I would make for each picture. After the final script, after we decided on the final script... I would make these pre-production drawings of course before the script was finalised, and then the writer would write them in. They became his property. It's like Obie. So much of King Kong came from a picture he was working on called Creation, which he developed at RKO about a year before Merian Cooper came and the studio changed its policy. So much of Creation is in King Kong and... as well as a lot of O'Brien's ideas, he made sketches, and [Mario] Larrinaga, his art director, made sketches, and Byron Crabbe, and then they would take them to the story conference and the writer would write them in. So they became the writer's property. And for years I was very modest about contributing so much to the script until I discovered that in Hollywood modesty is a four-letter word. [laughter] So I thought I'd better expose it in the book.

TD: Do you want to add to that, Nick? About modesty...

NP: Oh gosh, I know nothing about that. [laughter]

Dinosaurs and Hydra

TD: Talking about pulling rabbits out of a hat, you've got another model, before we go on, that I'd like you to pull out of the hat.

RH: Which one would that be?

TD: I'm not going to tell you the name because you're much better at its pronunciation than I am. It sounds like I have a very bad speech impediment.

RH: It's anornithomimus. That was in The Valley of Gwangi. It's the only one that survived. Actually Gwangi is in Berlin, the real Gwangi, the armature. But this is the ornithomimus, and he has every joint that a real animal would have and if you've seen the picture Gwangi, you see the horseman chasing it and finally Gwangi grabs it and chews it up. But it has every joint that a real animal would have, and each frame of film you have to change its position, and match it to the background.

TD: And whilst we're on this model, I want to ask you one very key question: the modern concept of dinosaurs is that their tails are up.

RH: That's right.

TD: Now all your tails are down.

RH: Well that was Charles Knight's concept, in the early days, he was the first one to make pictures, paint pictures of a restoration of dinosaurs, and I think they were beautifully done, and then all of a sudden, somebody said 'well dinosaurs don't drag their tails, they're up in the air.' And now they design all the animals with their tails up in the air, and I don't agree with that, I think somebody made a goof [laughter]... and it makes them look like they're constipated. [laughter] So I prefer to drag my tails. Then you can have them whipping...

TD: I think the tail gives them enormous character.

RH: It does a lot, particularly to any lizard-type of creature. But it did on the Ymir as well.

TD: But it does, it shows their anger, their frustration. It comes out actually in the tail... From dinosaurs, we're next going to go on to a clip from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which is 1974, and this is the fight with the mechanical goddess, Kali. Can we have the next clip, please?

[Film clip: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad]

TD: Great sequence, great score.

RH: It is, Miklós Rózsa did the score for that film, and I thought he did a wonderful score. You notice the telegraph message he put, sort of like a dot and dash in the music score, as though the magician mind is keeping the statue alive. That's very important. When we shot the thing, we tied three stuntmen together, to get all the arms, so the actors could rehearse with the stuntmen, and they had to rehearse seven, eight times and didn't know where to stop their swords, and we tied these three stuntmen together, one behind the other with a big belt, it was quite grotesque on the set [laughter] and so we went through that and performed the swordfight with these three men portraying the arms. I had to keep track of which arm was going where.

TD: And there's a famous story about keeping a track, isn't there? I think it was the Hydra, you were animating the Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts.

RH: Oh yes.

TD: And the phone rang... tell us about that...

RH: Yes, the Hydra had seven heads, and some were going forwards and some were going back, and the phone rang and I thought I'd better answer it and when I came back I forgot whether the third head was forward or backward, and so I had to start all over again. [laughs]

TD: It doesn't show.

RH: So I don't... well I did... that was only the second retake that I did.

TD: Oh right...

NP: That's it, that's it, just to add to that, because I was wondering how you went about... you've explained already how you went about the choreography. It seems so much of your craft is about choreography.

RH: Yes, and split timing. That makes it convincing that the creature is on the same plane with the actor. So that's very important. And we photographed the stuntmen just as a guide, I can't use it to copy, but it's just as a guide. And then I have to be sure that I get a skeleton from point A to point B to stop that particular hand-sword and it gets quite complicated and time-consuming.

NP: So with Kali could you easily keep track of which sword was moving forwards and which one was moving backwards?

RH: Yes, so I didn't answer the telephone. [laughter]

TD: You do seem to make a rod for your own back, you do seem to make it very difficult for yourself, you've got seven-headed Hydra, you've got seven skeletons...

RH: Those snakes in Medusa's hair...

TD: Six arms on Kali... why? Is this a challenge?

RH: I like the challenge of the more complicated ones. When you just have a single figure, it's much easier to animate, of course, but I try to avoid mass... in CGI you can make 100 dinosaurs walking across the screen with very little effort, except time, and I couldn't do that in stop-motion, so we always stuck to one or two creatures, and I like the challenge of a seven-headed Hydra, because originally in the Jason story, it was a dragon in the original story and I felt we should draw a bit out of Hercules' legend and to make a seven-headed Hydra would be much more interesting than just a dragon. I think it was.

TD: I think it was much more interesting. What about the actual sound effects, the clashing of the sword, did you...

RH: Well those are put in afterwards, of course, that's why I have to be very careful that the split timing... that it's convincing on the screen, that the actor's sword meets the sword of the... it goes so fast so you can get away with murder sometimes.

NP: Was the actor... because I know in live action they're not meeting anything physical...

RH: No, they're shadow-boxing. After they rehearse seven or eight times with the three men tied together with a belt, they know pretty well by... as I say the head master claps it out, so they know that they've got to stop the sword there, and so the last piece of film that I use for a rear projection plate, the actors have to shadow-box. We take away the stuntmen, and that piece of film is the final film where they shadow-box. And then I try to match all the action, that means counting every frame, and trying to get two or three skeletons here and there in the right position.

NP: That film had such a lot of magic for me because it was... I remember when it came out, and seeing it in the theatre and I think it's something to do with... it taps really right in on a child's imagination, the way... even though it's really impressive with all those arms, and the Hydra with all those heads, some of the things that I've always found most impressive and which audiences, I think, often find most impressive are the simplest. It's when the statue comes alive, or when Talos turns its head in Jason and the Argonauts, it's that imagination of when you're in a graveyard, or when you see a statue, you imagine: what if it came alive, and you seem to have tapped right in there on something.

RH: Yes, that's what we tried to do, to give it sort of an introduction to... and suspense...

Clash of the Titans

TD: Do you find yourself sitting on a bus and looking at somebody doing something slightly unusual and making a note of it mentally?

NP: What, for my own work, you mean? Yes, yes, I often... even from being a toddler - I don't know if it was true of you, but my mother always said I'm very observant, I was a very quiet child and I used to just watch everybody else.

RH: Observation is very important. I know the same applied to me. I was a very shy young man and I observed rather than partook.

TD: How times have changed. [laughter] We're going to have our last clip now, it's from Clash of the Titans, of course, 1981, and it's the sequence that Ray Bradbury called probably Ray's greatest sequence, and it's the Medusa doing her evil best to get Perseus.

[Film clip: Clash of the Titans]

RH: Here's the model. This was made from the same mould as the original. I couldn't bring the original because it's at home but it's quite heavy. It has a metal armature, but this has a wire armature, it was a stand-in, but it's made from the same mould as the original Medusa. But you can see the problem with animating the tails of the snake and the heads - 12 snakes and 12 tails. You had to animate each frame, plus the snakes on her arm and the rattle of the tail, and keep them all in synchronisation, so it's quite a project, so I refused to answer the telephone. [laughter]

TD: Why did you go for having complete snakes - you can see the tails and the heads, rather than the snakes just coming out of the head.

RH: Oh I just thought that was more logical. I gave her a little... I noticed the one in the lobby from a classic... I did a lot of research on all the Medusas, and they all were just women with pleasant faces and snakes in their head, and so I thought I would give her a reptilian body because I didn't want to animate clothing. And so I gave her a reptilian body, as well as scales. I wanted her to look...

TD: ...ugly...

RH: ...like she needed beauty treatment of some sort. [laughter]

TD: And also the way she moved, Ray, which hopefully in a minute we'll come on to, the way she moved, you got the idea from another movie, didn't you? Where she's actually moving on her... she actually uses her arms to move.

RH: Well, from... yes, I remember years ago, in the 30s, seeing a picture called Freaks and they had some man in a circus with no legs and he had to pull himself along the ground and that came back to me and my mind, and I thought that would be a good way to have Medusa enter the scene because she has no legs, so she has to pull herself along with her arms, and it seemed to work out beautifully, it gives her a very weird impression when you first see this thing pulling... it's like a freak, you feel sorry for it a bit.

NP: It's kind of surreal, the way you make her hover along.

RH: Yes, it was all thought of on the set, at the last minute. I did the broad outline sketches and then a lot of the other movements were all... because one pose leads to the other.

NP: I find it a very... it's a particularly frightening sequence, and very effective for that as well, you know, and quite sophisticated. From all of the films I find it particularly sophisticated in the way it's lit, and the sound editing.

TD: It's quite claustrophobic as well, isn't it?

RH: The sound effect department didn't want music in the background, but we felt that Laurence Rosenthal's score was very necessary, and I think it was. If you'd just left sound effects it might have been a little spookier, but...

TD: Talking about sound effects, how come she can scream with her head cut off? That's what I want to know.

RH: That's an interesting idea which you're not supposed to analyse. [laughter]

TD: And the nails on the stone.

RH: Yes, I wanted it like a blackboard, we wanted the creature to make this awful sound - I didn't quite reproduce what it sounds like when you scratch a blackboard with your fingernails, but that's the sound we wanted to get.

TD: They had trouble, the sound effects people had trouble getting that sound.

RH: Yes.

TD: Until...

RH: I don't know whether they scratched a blackboard or not, because...

NP: And what was that goo that came out of her neck.

RH: Oh that was wallpaper paste. [laughter] Yes, that was wallpaper paste, it was quite innocent and...

NP: Shot live action.

RH: Yes, it's supposed to poison everybody, but I didn't want to go to that extreme.

Cartoons and CGI

TD: At this point I'm going to open up to the audience, so if there are any questions. I'd like to ask you to, if you can, stand up, if you want to stand up, I'd be very grateful, but if you can speak as loudly and as clearly as possible. We'll start down the front.

Q: You've talked an awful lot about the animation. I've always been incredibly impressed with the way you light all your models, to get them to stand in with the background the film's part of. I was wondering how you went about actually lighting your models to film them.

RH: Well I did all the lighting, the camerawork, myself. Again, I worked alone on most of these things, and the lighting, of course, is dictated by what's on the background. Medusa presented a problem because we had these flames flickering throughout the sequence, so every time she appeared I had to have a flicker effect on her so that she wouldn't stand away from the background; she looked like part of the background - and that was very important. So the lighting... and I tried... I remembered seeing a film called Mildred Pierce years ago, so I tried to get the Joan Crawford lighting sometimes on her face.

TD: So there's a touch of Joan Crawford in the Medusa... [laughter]

RH: Not that she's a Medusa, no. I admire her acting.

TD: Sorry, this gentleman here in the front.

Q: This is probably a stupid obvious question, but why do they have to be so small, the models?

RH: Well, the skeletons presented a problem, because they were... we had seven skeletons in one scene at the same time, and the bigger projection you make, the more grainy you photograph, so I try to always keep the picture as small as possible. I have shot scenes where you used an eight-foot wide projection, but it tends to start losing in quality. These never work together, so I change the size and, depending on the sequence, it depends on what size the model will be.

NP: Do you find as well though, Ray, that like a large puppet like Medusa... or if it got bigger than that, would be harder to control as well?

RH: I think so, yes. For example, the Kracken, I had, from the waist up, built on a large scale, from the navel up it was about this big but, you know, you almost had to be a Greek wrestler to animate it [laughter] because the ball-and-sockets have to be so tight to pull against the rubber, so on a smaller creature... the walrus presented a problem. The rubber pulled against the armature, and so I had to cut a lot of the rubber away and stuff it with cotton, but those are all things that come up unexpectedly.

TD: There's a gentleman right in the middle...

Q: I was wondering whether if any, the influence of more ordinary, conventional animation... were Disney and Warner Bros.' cartoons or cartoon animation, were they an influence in any way?

RH: No, not animated cartoons, no, not much. I was highly influenced by Gustave Doré, the Victorian illustrator, and many others which are [Andrew] Marton on the photography end of it, but I wouldn't say cartoons influenced me, no.

TD: Disney beat you to an idea, didn't they? You were shooting a film as a young man, called Evolution.

RH: Yes.

TD: And then you went to the cinema and saw Fantasia.

RH: Yes, and I abandoned the film, that was on 16mm, because I knew I couldn't do what Disney did with his 300 people, and so I abandoned it, but I had it for... it came in handy for test footage to show what I could do.

TD: How about you, Nick, is cartoon animation...?

NP: Oh absolutely, yes. It's funny, on the one hand I grew up with Ray's stuff and absolutely adored it, on the other hand I had all this, you know, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones, you know, Tex Avery, influence.

RH: Well they're more stylised figures, aren't they?

NP: Yes.

RH: Like your designs.

NP: Yes, I mean the animation we do is, like you say, stylised and that's what... you know Plasticine lends itself to that...

TD: Another question? Gentleman here.

Q: You mentioned CGI very briefly. Phil Tippett has made the transition from stop-motion to CGI. Is this anything you've considered?

RH: No. I never considered it. I felt I'd had my time. I retired from film-making way back in the 80s, after Clash, and... it would have been a wonderful tool, I think CGI is a marvelous tool, but... so is the frame-grabber. But I was raised the other way and I didn't miss it, so I prefer not to use it.

TD: What do you think of dinosaurs created by CGI? What do you actually think of it?

RH: Oh I think some of it's remarkable. Walking with Dinosaurs was a remarkable image - to create all these animals that looked three-dimensional. They were remarkable. But I rather feel that fantasy... stop-motion lends something to fantasy, that if you make it too real, you lose the... it makes it mundane. For example, in the 50s and 60s, a startling image like the Cyclops was unique, because it wasn't on the screen. Now you see the most amazing things on a 30-second commercial, so you've lost the whole concept of the spectacular, the amazing, because everything is amazing, you know. It's mundane. But stop-motion gives this dream quality which I think is very necessary to our type of fantasy.

TD: Do you agree with that, Nick?

NP: Yes, I do, I do, I mean I'm a great admirer of lots of CGI work, but there is a... I wouldn't want to be negative at all but I do think Ray's right, there's a sense in which, as much as I really admire... especially when I first saw Jurassic Park, for example, but there's a sense now that I take it for granted as well. I think that maybe it's living in a technological age, I don't know, but I've always regarded Ray's work as very special, because of the way it is.

TD: Let's take a question down here.

Unrealised projects

Q: Have you ever been called onto other movie sets, as an adviser?

RH: No... I have been on a commercial. They did a thing for 'Dairylea Dip', I think it was...

TD: It was something like that.

RH: I was an adviser on that. Much easier way to make a living. [laughter] I got more money for just being an adviser than if I had actually done the animation! [laughs]

TD: Two more questions, let's have the lady here... Sorry, yes you... [questioner is a man] Sorry, I apologise! [laughter]... I can't see you properly. Sorry.

Audience member: I wanted to know if there was a story or a creature, Ray, that you had a burning desire to do, but you never did?

RH: At one time I wanted to do Dante's Inferno, because I was highly influenced... Gustave Doré was my mentor, of my style of drawing, and I wanted to do Dante's Inferno and then it would require, unfortunately, at that time, a lot of nudity, which was rather certified in films, unlike today, and then I started thinking if I do this Dante's Inferno, are people going to sit for an hour and a half of watching tormented souls? [laughter] and now they sit for three hours watching tormented souls, you know! [laughter] That's what I rather fear about the films today, they all are so negative, and I'm rather glad I didn't make Dante's Inferno.

NP: I noticed in the book - on sale, outside [laughter]...

RH: There's no book!

NP: There's a whole list at the back of projects that you didn't quite get underway.

RH: That's right, yes.

NP: A whole list of them, which is very interesting, and one of them I notice is Beowulf.

RH: Yes. We were considering Beowulf at one time.

NP: I've always thought that someone like yourself should do that.

RH: It would have been an interesting project. It might be a little too obscure to make a commercial film out of it.

TD: You wanted to do War of the Worlds, didn't you?

RH: Yes, originally, after Mighty Joe I made a lot of sketches for War of the Worlds. I wanted to keep it in the period that H.G. Wells wrote it, of the Victorian period, and I made eight big drawings, some of which are published - in the book [laughter] and it would have been an interesting picture, if it was made years ago. But since then so many pictures of that nature have been made that it wouldn't be quite unique as it would have been.

TD: I'm afraid that's all we've got time for... unfortunately... I suspect we could go on for another half hour or even several hours. I'd like to say thank you Nick, thank you Ray, for coming tonight. But before we finish tonight we're actually going to be showing Ray's latest film, called The Tortoise and the Hare, which was started in 1952 [laughter], so it's 50... no 1953, sorry...

RH: Fifty-two.

TD: 52, right, so it's actually 51 years old, and probably the longest production in the history of film-making. And actually, some of Ray's original test footage, or footage that he shot in 1952, is actually integrated in the film. Do you want to say some more about the film, Ray?

RH: Yes, I would like to say that at one time somebody in Germany wanted to finish the film for me, but that all fell through. And finally, two young men, who were great fans of ours, in Burbank, wrote to me and said they'd like to finish the film. They saw clips of it on a programme, and they said 'could we... we would love to finish the film for you.' So I looked at some of their work they had done and I felt their enthusiasm would bridge a lot of things, that would work out quite well, and so I loaned them the puppets - I still had the puppets. And I loaned them the puppets and my original 16mm camera and in their spare time they completed the film. I had to rewrite the script because I lost it, I didn't know where the script I had composed at that time. So I had to rewrite the whole thing, and illustrate the sets and then I faxed them to them and sent them by mail, and we used the telephone a lot. Occasionally I would go - over the two-year period that it took - to do a scene or two, they talked me into doing a couple of shots, which I won't tell you which ones they are...

TD: You'll have to guess...

RH: I thought they did a wonderful job, they studied all my fairy tales that I'd made previously and we tried to keep the naïve quality of the 50s that the other fairy tales had. And we used a narrator, Gary Owens, he did a wonderful job of narrating it. And then we use canned music. I was offered by a school that they would compose the music and play it with the school orchestra, if I wanted to, but I felt it wouldn't match the other fairy tales, so we resorted to canned music, and we found 11 records that we felt would fit perfectly. But do remember that this was... we were trying to keep it in the same realm as the original fairy tales. So they may not compete with Tom and Jerry, or some of the things you see today...

TD: Or even Aardman...

RH: Or even Aardman [laughter]... but I think if you think of them in that period of the 50s, you'll enjoy it.

TD: And even Nick hasn't seen this tonight, and this is a... I think we can call it a European premiere, so we're going to be very lucky to see it tonight, it's just been shipped over from America, hasn't it?

RH: Yes.

TD: Ladies and gentlemen. Let's thank Nick and Ray very much for coming along this evening.

[applause]